Teaser Tuesday - Visiting Tom

Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following: Grab your current readOpen to a random pageShare two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!


I discovered Michael Perry with his book Population: 485 while I was in my "read everything I  could find about firefighting" phase. Since the book deals with his experiences as a volunteer fireman in a small Wisconsin town, it fit my criteria nicely. I guess I came for the fire and hung around for the wonderful writing. So this week, I'm reading Perry's Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace


Blurb
Tuesdays with Morrie meets Bill Bryson in Visiting Tom, another witty, poignant, and stylish paean to living in New Auburn, Wisconsin, from Michael Perry. The author of Population: 485, Coop, and Truck: A Love Story, Perry takes us along on his uplifting visits with his octogenarian neighbor one valley over—and celebrates the wisdom, heart, and sass of a vanishing generation that embodies the indomitable spirit of small-town America.

TEASER:
It's only two-tenths of a mile long, but the pitch is such that if you're headed uphill and more than an inch of snow blankets the blacktop, you need a full head of steam upon approach or you'll ascend three-quarters of the way and then slide down backward--a bracing experience if you are hauling several thousand pounds of milk or a vanful of family. You really haven't butt-clenched the seat covers until you've surrendered a hill mid-blizzard, in the dark, in reverse, with the wheels locked and no point of reference but a pair of obscured mirrors.


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